Work Text:
Travelling the Multiverse
The first time they died in a stampede. He’d awoken, full of the unshakable knowledge that his name was Gene Autry and he worked as a roving cattlehand, glad to find this job on a drive on the Chisholm trail. It wasn’t, and he didn’t. He’d bolted to his feet, thinking that some of the fellows from campus had played some sort of trick and left him in the desert.
His startled yells, and those of the other boy who woke up in the blanket roll on the other side of the fire, had spooked the cattle. Neither of them had known what the rumbling in the pitch black of the moonless night had been, until the first of the running cattle had crossed into the firelight. There had been no time to run, and no room for fear amidst the utter confusion, and it hadn’t taken long.
The second time, he’d been hung, and he’d been plenty afraid.
It had taken dozens of tries to learn the rules.
At first they didn’t survive long. They’d found each other the second time, the brief glimpse they’d caught of each other over the fire had stuck, and waking the second time, in the bunkhouse at the Rocking H ranch, the morning of the town fair, they’d recognized each other instantly. They’d started babbling, trying to exchange information about what had happened, and the other cattlemen had been startled, by talk of a university campus in 1950, a scientific experiment to investigate the possibility of multiple universes, and dying in a cattle stampede. The men had tried to reason with the two of them, and then decided they must have accidentally ingested some poisonous prairie weed that was making their usually sensible foreman and his second, crazy.
They’d tied them up, put them in the back of a horse drawn wagon , and taken them into some old prospecting town to see a doctor who had jars of live leeches on his shelves.
Just then the bank had been robbed across the street and acting on the same sort of instinct that made him understand that he was Gene Autry, foreman of the Rocking H ranch and part time fairground entertainer, kicked the back leg off Frog’s chair so he could get his tied wrists off of it, and when the other boy had freed him in return, he dragged him out the back door into an alley.
A man had come racing down the alley on a big black and white horse, and torn open a bag he carried at this side on a piece of protruding timber. A huge stack of old fashioned bank notes dropped at the boys’ feet.
Before they could react, the sheriff and his men had raced around the corner, and yelled, “Now we’ve gotcha!” They were waving revolvers, one man had a rifle.
Frog had turned, run, and been shot in the back before he made it six steps.
“Why’d you do it, Gene?” The sheriff asked, and before he knew it, he was sitting under a tree on a strange horse with a dark brown coat and a big white patch on it’s nose.
Champion, he knew, was the horse’s name.
He hadn’t seen much of the sheriff or the posse, but he remembered the feeling of the rope around his neck. He remembered trying again to explain that he was a university student, that he’d never seen any of them before, and that they’d misunderstood. He’d begged.
That was what stuck with him afterwards.
Shame that he’d cried and begged.
He’d been right to be afraid, though.
A drop off a horse and a flexible tree branch hadn’t been clean.
--
Then he opened his eyes to the midafternoon sun drifting in under his hat, and the calm sound of horses moseying on rich grassland. He was Gene Autry, and he was taking a nap on his afternoon off from work at his father’s Bar Rafter ranch. He had nothing to be responsible for today, except getting to the saloon before 8 to sing with his band, the group of cowhands who worked here at the ranch. A group of other young men who respected and looked up to him. Foremost among them…
“Gene,” Called a young man in a singsong voice, “Hey Gene! Get up, it’s time for dinner.”
He lifted the hat off his face and sat up.
That other boy, the one he’d seen the other two times, was trudging up the meadow, from the white clapboard ranch house, where he knew instinctively, he’d been born and raised.
Frog, he’d introduced himself as, then quickly corrected himself, Lester. He was another student who’d signed up with Professor Sam Beckett’s multiple universes experiment. Gene...Orvon...His name was Orvon, not Gene, no matter what these lives would have him believe, couldn’t remember ever meeting him.
Except in the two other lives.
The memories in his head insisted this was Frog Millhouse, his boyhood friend who’d come to work on the ranch. He was in Gene...Orvon’s band.
Frog put his hands on his knees and puffed from the exertion of the walk up the hill. When he looked up his eyes widened. “You’re you, aren’t you? Where have you been?? I’ve been here two days, trying to get you to recognize me. I didn’t say it flat out, cause of those guys back in the last...place, and you were sure I was who...who I remember being, and you told me to stop fooling around, but you’re you, now, right? Orvon.”
He stood up. “Two days??” The last two times they’d both woken up at the same time, knowing about their lives, but never having lived in them before. If Lester had woken up two days ago, and the Gene he’d spoken to had been...the Gene who was supposed to be here, presumably, then what had happened to that Gene?
“Well I’m glad you’re here, we’ve got to talk about this!” Frog glanced back at the ranch house and then pulled him over behind a stand of trees where they couldn’t be seen.
“Do you remember the experiment?” He asked Frog. “All I remember is going into the room, and then the next thing I knew, I was waking up on the Chisholm trail.”
They’d sort of covered this last time, but they’d been in such a panic, neither of them had made much sense.
“I don’t remember either. I remember the stampede, I remember seeing this great bull come over the campfire, and run you down, and then I ran, but I couldn’t see nothing, and I tripped. Then I was waking up at that bunkhouse, and we made the other guys real upset, talking about back home, so they made us go to the doctor. Then you got me out,” He looked confused and then said, “And that bank robber dropped all his loot, and that posse came…and they shot us. Then I woke up here,” He waved a hand at the brush obscuring the ranch, “And when I saw you,” He gestured at Orvon, “I knew right away, you looked the same, but...you weren’t Orvon. You looked comfortable here, like you believed the story in your head.”
He looked extremely nervous, then. They hadn’t talked about this before. “Every time I wake up, I think I remember who I am, Frog Millhouse, and where I grew up, and where I am and everything. Like someone’s telling me.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Orvon reassured him, “It’s happening to me, too. Gene Autry, son of the ranch owner. We’re in a band.”
“Right,” Frog said. “And when I talked to you, before, you were acting just like the memories say you act.”
“So we are borrowing people’s lives?” Orvon asked. “And...what happened to the Gene and Frog in the stampede, and the bank robbery?”
Frog looked pale. He just shrugged.
“We’ve got to find a way back. We have to go talk to Professor Beckett,” Orvon stood up.
Frog put a hand out and grabbed his arm. He shook his head. “It’s 1862,” He said. “The University ain’t even there yet.”
“We’ll have to find someone else…” Orvon trailed off. Who could they find in 1862? Professor Beckett had been years ahead of any other scientist in the world, his machine was a quantum leap in dimensional physics. There wasn’t going to be anyone who could help them for another ninety years.
“Okay,” He started again, “Well first thing we gotta do is not get ourselves killed this time. This place seems less dangerous than the last couple, we’ll just settle in like we belong here. I think I have enough memories to keep me from calling anyone the wrong name, and now we know people...around here...aren’t going to accept us talking about things...Gene and Frog...shouldn’t know, we can be sure only to talk about it when we’re alone, and not make anyone think we’re crazy or burn us for witches or anything.”
Frog nodded. “Do...you know how to play guitar, Orvon?”
“You’d better call me Gene, and I’ll call you Frog, just to be safe, and yes, I can play, a little.” When Frog mentioned guitar, Orvon was filled with memories of little Gene Autry learning to play at his mother’s knee, before she’d passed on, and being rather good at it. Being cheered at public performances. “Maybe not as good as Gene was…”
His memories of the band included memories of Frog, playing four different instruments and singing in a sweet voice with a huge range.
“Cause I can’t…” Frog said. “I can’t play the bassoon, or the guitar, or the piano, or the accordion. I hadn’t ever seen an accordion before I woke up and there was one in my room, and Orvon...Gene... I can’t sing!! I sound like a foghorn.”
Orvon stared at him. “We’ll tell them you have a sore throat. And then...we’ll figure something out after that, you’ll learn...or you’ll say you lost interest or something. How often can singing be important?”
--
Two days later they’d both died shut in a mine Gene’s father hadn’t realized was on the ranch, that two unscrupulous men had found and been determined to mine without the ranchers noticing. Gene and Frog had come upon them while out looking for someplace to talk, and been shoved into the mine and the entrance blown in. The whole mine had collapsed on top of them.
--
Later:
He awoke in a bedroll, under a cold sky. The dawn light was just coming up, and he knew that he had woken early as always to start the fire and get on coffee for the boys in the Medicine Show. Good. He liked the Medicine Show.
Sometimes they spent months riding with the Medicine Show before the danger started.
He got up and didn’t bother fishing up the memory of his morning routine. His body knew it, if he didn’t try to get in it’s way. There was a crisp breeze blowing, and the air smelled clean. No cattle was one of the perks of the Medicine Show. He scooped out the coffee he knew he had thoughtfully ground the night before, so the sound wouldn’t bother any of his companions while they snatched at those last moments of sleep.
He glanced around the wagon at the string of horses. He was glad to see the dark horse with the blaze grazing among them. He clicked his tongue and Champion looked up, beautifully trained as always. “That’s my boy,” He whispered, “Glad to see you’re here, already.”
He wondered if the horse went through the cycles with them. There were a few faces they saw again and again, but none of them ever acknowledged knowing anything about reliving lives, or Professor Beckett, or anything about the multiple universe theory. He and Frog had burned one of their lives interrogating Shorty, who travelled with “Gene and Frog” regularly. He wasn’t always Shorty. Sometimes his name changed, and always his circumstances, but so did theirs. He hadn’t known anything. Even when they put the questions to him hard.
In the next life when they’d seen him, he hadn’t been any different than he ever had been, and seemed to trust them just as much.
So, with the possible exception of Champion, Gene and Frog were alone.
He sat on a rock and watched the sun rise.
As near as he could tell, they had spent about 10 years living other people’s lives, when the days were added together.
Today was going to bring something new.
He could see the smoke rising from a town’s worth of chimneys in the distance. The Doctor, whichever one it was, usually liked to stop part of a day’s ride outside town and arrive, singing and playing, in the town’s main street, just before lunch.
If he and Frog were joining them so close to a town, the danger must be just about to start. Good, he wouldn’t have to wait for his nerves to betray him. In fact…
He heard the drum of galloping horses.
He drained the last of his coffee and stood up to look down at the road. A scream floated, thin through the air. He tossed his cup to the side, ready to run to their aid.
Instead of the runaway wagon he’d expected, the horses were just two young men racing, dressed as dandys, headed into town, their screams resolving into whoops and taunts as they rode.
He plucked his cup out of the dirt and sat back down.
At the sound, Frog had rolled out of the bedroll under the wagon. “What was THAT?! Not another of those carriage wrecks...I can’t stand those. All those poor people at the bottom of canyons.” He walked past the trees and looked after the racers, down the road. “Just a couple fools racing, I see.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Orvan said.
“At least we don’t have to pick up no bodies today,” Frog came and sat down beside Gene and poured himself a cup of coffee.
Frog was the more interested in food of them, and he started breakfast as the rest of the crew of the Medicine Show woke up. All of them were familiar. Shorty, Stubby this time was the only face Gene recognized, from other lives, but he’d have known their part in the show anywhere. The Doctor was a tall, thin man this time, with a huge bushy moustache. The dancer was a handsome black man. There was Shorty and two other men who did odd jobs and played, respectively, the guitar, the fiddle, and the bugle. His memories told him this time, Frog would play the accordion. He was becoming nearly as an accomplished player as the man whose life he was borrowing.
And he’d gotten around the singing voice famously.
The frog croak made everyone laugh.
And he could sing, when he put his mind to it. The Frog who travelled from life to life was developing quite a repertoire, whether or not the talented musician he was replacing had known the songs.
Gene had learned to rely on well trained fingers to remember the chords to his guitar songs, and then slowly developed his own skill, in what little free time he had.
The danger didn’t always start right away. Sometimes they lived on a ranch, or a prospecting camp, or the medicine show, for weeks or months before the unscrupulous men showed up. Twice, they’d even been teenagers together. Those had made up most of his calculation of 10 years.
He hummed a bit of a song. It felt right, so he started to sing it aloud. A song about waking up in the prairie breeze, and following the dogies home. Frog and the crew joined in.
Frog had asked him once, why he felt the need to do that.
He’d never been able to explain it, or understand it.
He noticed Frog joined in every time.
So it was another of the strange aspects of their strange lives.
“Hey Doc,” Orvon called. “Frog and I are gonna ride along towards that town and check it out before the show.”
“But Gene, we need you for the big entrance!” The tall man protested.
“We’ll be back in time to ride in with you,” Orvon assured him.
“Why’d you want to get me alone?” Frog asked, once they had Champion and the other horse saddled and they were riding among the trees, giving a wide berth to the road. There were always people hurtling up these roads at fantastic speed, and a few times, the two of them, or sometimes they and a dozen cowhands and a whole herd of cattle had been run off the road by loose wagons, cars, busses, or even groups of riders.
So Orvon liked to stay off the roads if possible. Frog always got so distressed, picking up the survivors after the inevitable crashes.
He didn’t remember that road travel had been so dangerous, in the history books.
It might not have to be.
“I’ve been thinking about why we’re here,” Orvon said.
“Because of that ole machine of Professor Beckett’s?”
“Did you read a lot back home, Frog?”
“Sure, I had to study for all those classes.”
“Ever read comic books?”
“Sure, doesn’t everybody?”
“My mom always said they were a waste of time.”
“Sure, doesn’t every mom?”
“You remember those old Tarzan comics? Where he’d fight some animal or some wild tribe who were out after the apes, and he’d save Jane and they’d live happily ever after? But in every comic, it was kind of the same? Like why didn’t he just build a rock wall in the entrance to the elephant graveyard?”
“Because if it didn’t keep happening, there wouldn’t have been a story. It would have just been, so his problems were solved and he swung around the jungle eating fruit and kissing on Jane.”
“Yeah,” Orvon said. “That’s just what I mean.”
“I don’t get it,” Frog said.
“You notice how everywhere we go, there’s always a bank robbery or someone is trying to steal the deed to a mine, and no matter how much we mind our own business, we always stumble right into it?”
“Well they called it the Wild West for a reason.”
“But what about that time we decided to take that boat to Europe, and the man who wanted to marry Mr Jepson’s daughter was on the same boat with us? Even though he’d said he was going to sell Mr Jepson’s ranch in San Francisco, and we couldn’t go anywhere on that boat without overhearing him talk about his plan?”
“Yeah, that was a weird coincidence.”
“We had at least 8 chances to stop him from selling the deed to Mr Jepson’s ranch.”
“Only until that boat sank in the middle of the Atlantic! I was so glad we came back in Kansas that time. I never wanted to see the ocean again.”
“Frog, I think we’re heroes.”
“I ain’t.”
“I mean I think...the reason we keep coming back in wild situations is...I think we’re characters in a story. A lot of stories.”
Frog’s jaw dropped. “You put jimson weed in your coffee this morning?”
At that moment there was the sound of horses galloping. This time it was accompanied by the clatter of wheels and the scream was unmistakable and frightened.
He’d known it was going to happen. Somehow, he’d known.
It was part of the story.
Gene rose up in the stirrups. “That wagon is running away!” He said the words, not stumbling over them, like his body wanted to say them.
He kicked Champion to a run.
It felt right.
It felt easy .
The old woman and the girl were doing absolutely nothing to save themselves, but screaming, and Champion outran the four horses pulling the empty wagon like he was jet powered. Someone sane never would have considered it, but if he messed up, he would just come right back, wake up in another horse camp or settler’s cabin or under a prairie sky.
Gene stood up and jumped onto the lead horse.
He pulled the reins, and though the young woman had been tugging and them, screaming at the horses to stop, and they had not responded, a light pull from him had the horses calm and slowing.
He looked up to see the canyon twenty feet ahead of them.
A chill ran up his spine.
It only confirmed his suspicions.
He went back to see if the passengers were alright.
And that was when he remembered the other part of being a hero.
The beautiful blonde girl smiled down at him in deepest admiration. “You saved us!”
--
He wasn’t bullet proof.
More importantly, Frog wasn’t bullet proof.
And since Frog was the lynch pin of his success- even a seemingly simple and foolproof plan would spring haywire without Frog’s full support- Frog getting shot was a disaster.
And, in a deeper and more human place inside him, it tortured Gene every time Frog got hurt. He had bought into the hero theory after the first attempt, because once Gene and Frog had saved the girl, it turned out she had all sorts of helpful resources that prevented the unscrupulous men from poisoning all the water in the surrounding hillsides with some kind of mercury mining.
Then, for the first time, instead of dying, they went to sleep after the town was safe.
And woke up in new lives.
It was still Gene who was the reason Frog put himself in harm’s way. Neither of them would ever want to go back to wondering how long it would be before the story chased them down and killed them for refusing to participate. Neither of them wanted to turn corner after corner and keep coming face to face with the plot.
If they’d realized they could win , Gene would have started riding after runaway stagecoaches a long time ago.
Stories had rules, though.
Gene had to survive.
Frog did not.
Not all their stories ended with a quick kiss with the girl of the week.
There weren’t many, but sometimes the story ended in tragedy. Yet Gene still went to sleep and woke up in the next story.
The stories where Frog wasn’t necessary for a successful ending left them both quiet and cold.
Compared to that, Gene would rather take a bullet.
It wasn’t Frog’s fault he was the sidekick.
“Frog?” Gene asked.
They had just left a story where they had fought in the civil war, again. Cavalry, as usual. Now they were outside a little cabin, with a little kitchen garden and a wheat patch, in the middle of a dense forest. Their stuff was all packed in a covered wagon and Gene had a flyer for the Oklahoma Land Race, and a memory of a plan to get a place under the sky.
Frog, for once, had outlived Gene. That happened, sometimes, when Gene tried to follow a story down the wrong path, didn’t find a piece of evidence in time, or sometimes, when Frog was left behind to guard something, or sent off to fetch something, he came back to find Gene had needed him after all.
“You okay, buddy?”
“You know what happens when you die and I’m not in line for it right away?” Frog asked. He was leaning on the lodgepole fence around the wheat patch, with his back to Gene.
“I guess...the story gets you? Like it used to get us when we didn’t play along.” Gene approached the fence, thinking to rest his arms on the top of it, like he did when they watched the sunset out here. This was the first time he’d seen a sunset, but the memory was there. Something kept him from doing it, this time. Something about Frog seemed wrong.
The burly man hung his head. “There’s no story once you’re gone. Usually whatever got you gets me, pretty quick after. The bad guys making sure to shut me up, but the war doesn’t care if I talk. When Captain Autry went down under the charge, the story ended. Didn’t matter if Sergeant Millhouse survived or not.”
“It matters…” Gene put his hand out, but he couldn’t bring himself to set it on Frog’s shoulder.
“Not for me it doesn’t. See, you’re the hero. The rest of us are just supporting characters. No one reads a comic and wonders what Cheetah the ape did after Tarzan went back to the treehouse.” He shuffled his feet in the dust and looked out at the trees.
“You’re important, Frog. You’re a hero, too. We win or lose together. Neither of us can do it alone.”
“When you die before me, nothing happens anymore. You know that feeling you get when there’s a runaway stage? I get that same feeling when I’m sneaking into a badguy’s hideout, or when we’re in a bar and I know a barfight is about to start. I know what I’ve got to do to make the story right.”
“Okay…?”
“That goes away when you die. I’m back to being a normal guy. And the story doesn’t come after me. It doesn’t follow me once you’re gone. When you’re gone, I’m on my own to die.”
Gene took a step back. “Frog…”
“Like I said, usually what gets you gets me right after. Not always, though.”
“You don’t mean you...kill yourself…”
“When the war ended, I wanted to see, really see, if the story would come back for me.”
“So you didn’t kill yourself.” Gene sighed in relief.
“I got old!” Frog whirled around. “It let me live out my life. I never married, couldn’t stand to, but I moved around, worked, until I was nearly seventy. I made it all the way to 1910. Thought about trying to find Professor Beckett, but by then I was too doddering to manage much of anything. Died one night in my sleep.” He stepped close to Gene, getting into his face, and Gene stepped back again, alarmed by the bigger man.
“Frog…”
“That’s how important I am! Not the least bit! There was never any story, because Champion broke his leg riding down that hill.”
“I’m...I’m sorry…” He didn’t know what to say. That must have been awful, and lonely and... Frog had just lived 50 years in the time since what felt like last night?!
For Gene, it had been the bugle call, the evening charge of the cavalry horses, bad lighting and feeling Champion stumble, seeing the ground hurtling towards him. He must have broken his neck or been trampled pretty quickly, because the next thing he knew he was waking up in one of the narrow beds in the cabin, seeing Frog waking, looking pale in the other corner of the room.
He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around his best friend. “I’m sorry, Frog. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you behind.”
--
The girls were a problem.
They threw twists into the plans. Some of them were rude. All of them were intractable. They melted into doe eyes when he sang to them a few times.
He didn’t love them.
Sometimes, in the course of the time that the story took over, and the instinct made him chase down a rustler or throw a punch in a bar or walk into a room where he had no business , he spoke to a girl for less than an hour before he was pulling her out of a mineshaft, or carrying her out of a burning barn.
The urge to propose was overpowering. Since the first of them, he’d tried resisting, but the weddings were even harder to avoid than the deaths, and the harder he tried, the more he was punished by the story. Framed, outlawed, imprisoned, subjected to brutal fistfights.
And then the stomach sinking awareness that after the story was over...he was going to wake up in a new life.
He hoped the person he remembered having been came back to them, pleased at the strange adventure and the wife.
He heard one of the other cowhands tell a story one time of how, when he’d left his father’s house and come out west, everything had happened in a blur and that he could barely remember how he’d found himself standing in front of a ranch house, reins in hand, on his way in to get this job.
Gene hoped that was what it seemed like to the Gene who came back to the life after the story. He hoped it felt like Gene’s memories of the life before the story, familiar and personal, and easy to believe it had been he who’d done them.
He hoped they were kind to the wives, and hoped the wives were happy with the man they got.
It still felt ugly, though. As often as he could, he made sure to spend the wedding night travelling.
--
“Mister! Listen. I’m not who you think I am!” The boy was in his late teens, one of the farmers’ sons. The boy had a tough upbringing, mother passed away, the only son of a father whose ideals didn’t match his own. Jeremiah only wanted the best for the boy, and usually the boy was a friendly, conscientious kid. He didn’t usually yell at his father on the sidewalk in front of the dry goods store.
“Gene,” Frog said, clutching a hand around Gene’s biceps. “Look at Jeremiah’s son.”
They weren’t the only people looking. The school mistress had chased the boy out of the schoolhouse with a broomstick. He was too old to be in school. He was holding one of the schoolbooks in one hand, the other wrist caught in his father’s grasp.
“Leave me alone!” The boy wailed. “I want to go home!”
“Gene, we gotta help him!”
“It’s his father’s business,” Gene said. Nothing was driving him towards the scene. He knew he was supposed to be meeting the train, to collect the mail that would need to be delivered to the pony express office, but that wasn’t for another hour.
“ Orvon! ” Frog hissed.
Gene whirled around to stare at Frog. He hadn’t even heard that name in...it had been years, now. Frog’s face was deadly serious, and trying to tell Gene something.
“Hey!” Gene turned around and started out into the street. “Roy, thanks for getting that book for me.” He swaggered up onto the sidewalk in his best hero strut and took the book from the boy’s hand. “What’s the big todo?” He asked Jeremiah and the school mistress.
He had a sinking feeling when he looked into the school mistress’ eyes and felt that familiar instinct.
“This boy ran into my classroom, yelling about history and stole one of the schoolbooks,” She told him.
“Boy was running through town, screaming like a lunatic,” Jeremiah said, shaking his son’s arm.
Gene smiled with all the charm he could muster. The story wasn’t helping him, here, it was going to sit back and let him take whatever trouble he worked up for himself. “Course he did. Didn’t he say? I sent him over. We had a big ruckus up at the pony express office, and needed to look something up, right away. I’m sorry,” Big smile, offered hand. “I’m Gene Autry, one of the pony express riders.”
The school mistress glared at him. “Perhaps you should consider that school books are not your personal property, to be fetched from the school house at your whim, Mr. Autry.”
Gene tipped his hat. “My apologies, Ma’am. I suppose we’ll just have to wonder for now.” He handed the book back to her.
She took it like he’d handed her a dead snake.
Gene turned to the boy’s father. “You don’t mind if Frog and I take Roy back to the pony express office with us, do you?” He asked. “We could really use his help with something.”
Jeremiah loosed the boy’s arm.
“My name’s not Roy!” The boy cried.
Frog clamped his hand over the boy’s mouth. “Come on, now, Roy , joke’s over. You come on with Gene and me, and we’ll get you all straightened out.”
The boy mumbled behind the hand, pulling at it, but his hands weren’t strong enough to pry Frog’s thick fingers loose.
“We’ll send him right home after he helps us out, the Pony Express will be real grateful, Mr Rogers,” Gene told Jeremiah.
“Alright…” He said.
Gene and Frog led the boy down the street towards the Pony Express office, but veered off at the last moment, pulling him aside into the dining room where the waiting pony express riders could be fed. Gene sent the cook out, giving him a few dollars to go to the store and get something special for supper.
They sat Roy Rogers down on a chair.
Gene had a pretty good idea what Frog had noticed. By now he’d come to awareness before Frog enough times to tell his Frog from the Frog who lived before the story at a glance.
This kid hadn’t been this kid yesterday.
And he was still new enough not to know not to scream about new lives and not being called what he thought he ought not to be called.
“What’s your name, Roy?” Gene asked, folding his arms on the table and making sure his voice was kind.
“It’s not Roy,” The boy answered. He was nearly in tears. “It’s Leo. Leonard.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Leonard,” Frog said in his kind voice, too.
“You guys don’t believe me,” Roy said, “You’re just shinin' me on.”
They shook their heads. “Where are you from, really? ” Gene asked.
“Ohio,” He answered.
“Are you by any chance, a University student, studying with a Professor Sam Beckett?” Gene asked.
The boy looked amazed. “How did you know that?”
Gene offered his hand. “I’m Orvon, this is-” He had to stop and think for a moment.
“Lester,” Frog said, holding his hand out as well.
“Orvon?! I know you! You’re in my literature class!”
Gene thought back. It had been too long. He didn’t remember much about any of his classes, anymore. “How long has it been for you? Since the experiment?”
“About three hours. I walked into the room, and then next thing I know, I’m waking up in Roy Rogers’ bed, all set to milk the cows and gather in the eggs.” The boy looked awestruck.
“When was it before that?”
“Huh?”
“What was the date of the experiment?”
“Oh, September 15, 1952.”
Frog covered his mouth. “You came from the same day as us. You’re just now getting here?”
The boy looked alarmed. “How long have you been here?” He looked them up and down. They were in their mid-twenties, they usually were, unless the story went on a particularly long time. Sometimes they’d been as old as their early forties, though they’d never looked it.
“About…” Frog started.
Before he could say thirty years, Gene stomped on his toe. “Awhile longer than that. Enough to know you can’t go around screaming that you’re not who people think you are. That sort of thing gets you killed.”
The boy’s eyes went wide. He was about 15, though Leonard must have been old enough to attend university, back in his real life. “I can’t...die here...I have dinner with my parents. It’s their anniversary.”
Gene sat back and crossed his arms. Frog made a noise that dropped into a low mournful wail.
“Here’s the thing, Roy,” Gene said. He could feel the instinct to go meet the train getting stronger, and he wanted to talk fast, but he needed to speak calmly so he didn’t frighten or confuse the boy. “The multiple universe theory is true. We’ve been to a whole lot of them. You can die here. And if you do, you’ll wake up in another life, in another universe. Here’s what you need to know- the memories about Roy’s life will always be trustworthy, and if you don’t fight remembering them, they’ll help you out. Whatever his body can do, your body can do, if you let it. Riding and roping and whatnot. Most important is- you don’t have to die . If you do what the story tells you to, it will show you what to do.”
He looked Roy up and down. “You got kind of a sad backstory, but your life is pretty good now, huh?”
Roy nodded.
“You play guitar back home?” Gene asked, recalling from his own borrowed memories, seeing the boy playing guitar at some of the barn dances.
“No, sir.” Leonard was already falling into the habit of responding to people as Roy would. That wasn’t a trait that would harm him. It was more likely to keep him safe.
“Your hands will know how, when it’s time.” Gene patted him on the shoulder. “We’ve got to get going. There’s a train on the way with the mail.”
A dreamy expression crossed Roy’s face. “I feel like I should tell you…” He murmured, turning his head like he was listening to something a long way off, “There’s a tree blocking the track…I heard it fall...Last night in the storm…”
His face focused again.
He seemed to realize what he’d said. “On no!” He jumped to his feet.
Gene was already on his way out the door. “Frog!” His hero instinct yelled, “Gather as many people as you can! I’ll ride out there and try to flag down the train!”
--
He supposed in a story where Roy hadn’t milked the cows and gathered the eggs and come into town with his pa, and instead had woken and run to check the track and warn the town, that there would have been plenty of time to clear the tree. He supposed if he, himself, had followed his instinct to go straight away to meet the train, something might have tipped him off about the tree.
At least fiery train wrecks didn’t give you time to hurt.
--
The mine was in real trouble. Old Mr McCann the owner hadn’t told any of the men, but the seam was tapped out. The mine, and the whole town would soon be out of business. Gene woke in the mine bunkhouse with a light heart. Today was the day he was going to tell the other boys about his plan to take them down to the radio station and win the radio city music competition.
He sat up in bed and started to sing as he dressed. Frog’s voice joined, predictably late, and the fair background voices he expected from the other miners, and then, from outside the door, a clear, beautifully trained voice, harmonizing with his own. Singing about the freedom of life in the old west.
Gene always found this ironic in settings before the civil war.
A young man opened the door and strode in. He was handsome and dark haired, and his mouth was open in the beautiful song. He wasn’t 15, now. He was their age.
Roy Rogers stopped dead when he saw who he was singing with.
He stared in shock and then threw a hero’s punch at Gene.
Gene swayed back and threw a punch that never failed to send rustlers or gangsters rolling.
Roy ducked like Gene was swinging a scarf in the breeze.
Frog tackled him from the side and Roy went down like so much kindling. He pushed Frog off him and leapt to his feet.
“Now. Now.” The other miners yelled, pulling the three of them apart. “Gene! Roy! Frog! This isn’t like you fellas.” The leader of the other miners said. “You three get outside and cool your heads.”
Roy stormed out the door, stalking down the sidewalk in front of the bunkhouse, to a stand of trees beside the slag pile that Gene’s memories told him was sometimes good for a moment of privacy. His hands were stuffed in his pockets and the happy, lighthearted air of the morning was gone.
“Why didn’t you tell me?!” Roy snarled, when they’d gotten well away from earshot of everyone else.
“Didn’t exactly have a lot of time,” Gene answered.
“How long?!” Roy whirled on them when they reached the trees. “How many times has it been for you? I’ve been in thirty seven of these stories. Do you know how many times I’ve been shot off Trigger’s back??”
Frog snorted derisively.
“We met you right before this,” Gene said. “Train explosion, then woke up here.”
“Well you certainly took the shortcut.”
“Leonard,” Frog said gently. “We’d been at it awhile before you showed up, so if you’d kindly shut the hell up.”
Gene’s mouth dropped open. Frog never cussed. In fact...he didn’t remember the last time he’d heard anybody cuss, at all.
“How??” Roy asked. “How do we get out?”
Gene and Frog stared at him. “Get out”
“Stop doing this, get home. You didn’t tell me that before you rushed off to finish your story and get the girl. I mean I
assume
you were supposed to marry that school teacher. She was the only woman in town who didn’t look like someone’s maiden aunt.”
“We don’t know,” Frog said. “Like I said. We’ve been at this awhile.”
Gene closed his eyes against a pressing need to get to the mess hall and sing. It was uncomfortable, like a hunger eating away at him. He didn’t want to have a fight about this. This story was supposed to be a good one. He didn’t want to roll the dice that whatever the next one was wouldn’t see him rising from tragedy. “I don’t want to fight you, Roy,” He sighed. “I want to go get the boys together and win the radio city music competition. I want to sing and foil a little radio rivalry. I don’t want to stand out here on a slag pile and wait for the story to realize we’re not doing our thing and drop the mountain on us.”
Roy took a shaky breath. “How long have you been doing this?”
“Long enough not to want to dare it to stop me,” Gene sighed. “Look we’re...in each other’s stories, now, we’ll probably have other chances to talk about this. I just want to enjoy an easy win.” He raised his shoulders and set them back. He held his hand out to Roy. “Come on. Come sing with me.” He put his arm around Frog. “Let’s go win a singing competition, and save the town.”
Roy stared at him suspiciously a moment longer, and then a smile crossed his lips. “Okay,” He slapped his hand into Gene’s. “Okay, Orvon,” He looked distant, like he was remembering, “Okay, Gene Autry. Let’s save the town.”
--
“When we were in New York with that Wild West show, I went down to that big library they’ve got there,” Frog said, walking his horse along beside Gene’s. “I found a book about literature.”
The cattle lowed behind them, but all the other hands were further back, out of earshot.
Gene plucked a few chords on his guitar. “Yeah?”
“It said that there are two kinds of stories. Tragedies and Comedies.”
“What about, like, ones where they go fishing?” Gene asked.
“Just listen. So tragedies are like stories that start happy and end sad, and comedies are stories that start sad and end happy.”
Gene chuckled and plucked a few more chords. “Is this about our travelling?”
“Yes. Just listen. I also found out that at the end of a tragedy, the hero dies, and at the end of a comedy, he gets married.” Frog fiddled with his reins.
“Well we’ve been in plenty of both.”
“I think our whole trip is one long story,” Frog said.
Gene looked at him and raised one eyebrow. “How can it be? Sometimes we’re in the civil war, sometimes we’re on a cattle drive, that one time we were actors in early Hollywood. That’s not even a story that makes sense. No one else is ever in it more than once except us and Champion. And sometimes other people, but they’re always someone different.”
“But if you look at it overall. Two boys volunteer for an experiment and go on adventure after adventure, it makes sense. Like Gulliver’s Travels. He went to all these different lands. He was the only one who was in it all the way through. We’re like that, travelling to different lands, but it’s still you and me, all the time.”
Gene started playing a song. “Well, I’ll talk to you about it in a minute. Got a song coming on.”
The other cowhands, responding to the music, moved up closer and began to sing a background melody.
Gene and the group sang of the sage and the rattlesnakes and the lonely coyote howling, and how they, too, wished their love would come to them across the desert sand.
The other cowhands drifted back to their places.
They weren’t near a road, so hopefully there would be no madcap women driving too fast.
Instead they topped a rise and a little heavily facaded town nestled in a dry valley below them. “Water rights, you think?” Gene asked.
“Fire, in the barns,” Frog answered, pointing out, nearly at the edge of visibility, where a farmhouse stood, beside an odd column of rising smoke and no other buildings nearby.
“Good eye,” Gene agreed.
He was feeling a strange itch between his shoulder blades. Over the years, between the two of them, they’d kept count, and their last adventure had been one of those where a dramatic incident in their youth had been followed by nothing much in particular for a dozen years, and then a sudden revival of the problem, with the return of a young woman Gene had grown up with, and her greedy fiancé, and his scheme to take over mayorship of the town.
They had been closing on it for years, but a dozen years growing up, probably the fiftieth time Gene had gone through late stage puberty, in Point Pines, a cattle town like every other, had pushed them beyond what could possibly be considered a natural human lifespan.
Granted, it had been lived in week and month intervals, punctuated by a few consecutive years, and mainly in bodies in their twenties or thirties.
They had been hopping from life to life for 130 years, as near as they could figure. They had lived out thousands of stories.
It was good they always had the same names, because it was getting embarrassing, shouting out, “I’ll save you, Miss Jane!” When it turned out the girl’s name was Eliza. And if Champion didn’t know the way from place to place, Gene would ride around in circles half the time.
He wondered if you could get senile, when the body you were inhabiting was twenty four.
Frog never seemed to suffer any similar sort of problem.
Gene had caught back up with him, after Frogs’ extra fifty years surviving the civil war. There had been a dude ranch in the 1930’s, and the story had seemed to go on a long hiatus, so he’d driven out to his hometown in Texas. The town had been there, eerily as he’d remembered it, except that his family hadn’t lived there. No one had recognized the names, and while there was a man and woman with two boys and a girl, just like his parents would have had in that year, they weren’t his parents and brothers and sister.
The story had caught up with him and made him return to the ranch, but for some reason, once he had saved the ranchlands, it had given him a break and he wasn’t irresistibly compelled to propose to the girl. He still felt a strong instinct, but he was able to resist it, and he went to the university to find any information he could on Professor Sam Beckett. He was there, but his field of study was astrophysics, and he was hard at work studying the possibilities of space travel. He didn’t recognize Gene when they spoke, and the university had no record of Orlan. Which it wouldn’t, since he wouldn’t have been born for a few years yet, let alone registered with the university.
He really was in a different universe. Nearly the same, but not quite.
Early on, sometimes in the night, Orvon would wake up, not into a new story, but just in the regular way, in whatever life they were in, to hear Frog crying. He hadn’t understood, then. Orvon hadn’t cried, and he was in just the same position as Frog. Lost, away from home, and in danger of dying at every turn.
Then after a few months of living life after life, before he had developed his hero theory, they’d been singers on a television show. Some of the stories happened in quite a modern timeline. During one night between bookings, when Frog had gone back to the hotel to sleep, and Orvon still thrumming with energy after the show, he’d walked down the street to a cinema, and sat through hour after hour of B movies.
Then the next day they’d come face to face with Tom Ford, a B movie actor.
And he looked exactly like Gene.
That had been when Orvon had begun to put together what was happening.
They were taking part in movies. Not as actors, but as the characters the actors played.
The times when their stories ended stupidly, or tragically, were stories that never got written, or stories that had been written and sat in a drawer somewhere, because no one had ever bothered to do anything with them.
The stories where they won, where they went on to new lives without dying.
Those were the stories people saw.
That had been when Gene started to cry himself to sleep. Just as sure as Gene had heard Frog, Frog must have heard Gene, but they never talked about it.
Orvon had been at the end of his rope when he’d stumbled onto the idea to try to be a hero. He’d tested, before the day of the runaway wagon. He’d stepped out from behind his cover during a shootout. He’d tried to convince people to agree with him, just using his smile and his music. He’d been fairly certain it would work.
And if he’d been crushed under the horses’ hooves.
He wouldn’t have been too sorry.
He’d been nearly ready to try eating bullets.
He suspected that was the point Roy had reached, when they’d come across him at the mine.
They’d seen him again, since. A few times. Champion and Trigger had greeted each other like old friends.
He wondered if Professor Beckett had ever run the experiment on any other students. He wondered how the man had gotten away with stuffing students into that room and then continuing to send more, even though Gene and Frog had never come back.
They’d met others, like themselves, and Roy, over the years. They sang at a party where a young man named Ken had recognized them for what they were immediately. Then there was the Texas ranger, and Spanish outlaw in California, who both went around in masks. Both of them had recognized Frog and Gene as being like them, and on hearing Don Diego’s real name, Adalberto, remembered him from several classes. Both of them had remembered Lester. Both of them seemed content, but their adventures, for some reason, occurred one after another, within the same life, though Adalberto had been through a few shorter instances before they met him, well into his late thirties, adventure ongoing.
Silver and Tornado also greeted Champion like they’d been herdmates their whole lives. The only other horse they saw repeatedly was a piebald Pinto that Champion fought repeatedly, and for a while Frog felt compelled to ride a series of grey horses with a marked circle drawn around their left eye.
“I think you have to find someone to fall in love with,” Frog said, breaking Gene out of his reverie.”
Gene groaned. Another girl. “That hasn’t been a solution so far. I’ve married girls before. I’ve even had babies with some of them.”
“You adopted those kids.”
“Not the…” He stopped. He remembered the baby, and the pregnancy, and the mother’s name, Annie. He did not remember the circumstances surrounding their relationship. “Annie and little Jane.”
“Did you love her?”
He’d loved the little girl. He’d loved Annie, too, in a way. It was hard to let yourself get attached to someone, knowing they were going to be ripped away from you, but he’d gotten as close to her as he could get to someone he had to continually lie to.
“She didn’t know me, she knew Gene Autry, from Big River or whatever.”
Had he had a brother in that one?
“Did you fall in love with her?” Frog insisted.
“No!”
“I think you have to fall in love.”
Gene slammed his hand down on the pommel of his saddle. “Well the story needs to leave me alone in one place for five minutes! And maybe let me tell somebody the truth.” He leaned back and shouted at the sky. “Set me up with someone who will believe me!”
Frog was mugging furiously at the cowhands behind them, trying to make them believe their trail boss wasn’t crazy. “He’s just foolin’ around,” He called back to them.
They rode into town and left their herd under the care of a man who would almost certainly steal them and sell them to someone else for a profit before Gene and Frog got in and out of the next building. And the sheriff looked exceedingly old.
Gene looked down at the design of his shirt, there was a big blank spot in the fancy stitching that looked just right for a tin star. “I think I’m going to take office again,” He murmured to Frog.
“I do always love it when you do that when there’s firebugs around,” Frog told him, patting him on the back. They followed the cowhands into the local saloon. Gene couldn’t drink, but Frog could, and somehow these places always served food along with the drinks, so Gene ordered something to eat and glanced around the room to locate the guitar. There was a bandstand in this place, loaded with instruments someone had just left lying around, and there was one man who looked vaguely familiar playing the piano, and Pete on the fiddle.
Pete was a fast fiddler, and a good man. He would be deputized by the end of this.
Shorty walked in through the saloon doors and joined Pete on the stage. Today he had a banjo. Lively music. Just right for a bar fight.
Gene wandered over to the stage. “Can I join you fellas?” He asked. They gestured him up, and he picked up the guitar, and started to sing a yodeling song about a girl on a mountaintop.
As he was singing it a fiery haired woman in cowgirl clothes, with pistols on her hips swayed into the bar. He nearly dropped the instrument.
She was like them .
She stopped when she saw him. She planted her hands on her hips and smirked. She went to the bar and ordered a drink.
How come she gets to drink and I don’t? He wondered.
She turned from the bar to confront a tall, burly man who’d put his hand on her shoulder.
“Hey, friend,” Gene called.
The man turned around.
The woman slugged him.
“Woah, she fights, too,” Gene laughed. He jumped down off the stage, because all the burly guys friends had joined in. “Come on, boys!” He yelled out of habit. It worked fine and Pete, Shorty, and the piano player, jumped off the stage after him.
He headed towards the big guy, who had gotten up and yelled, “Why I outta!” At the redhead. But she popped him in the face with the butt end of her horse whip.
Another guy grabbed her around the shoulders. Gene went to swing at him, but she had grabbed the guy’s hand and spun forward, flipping him over her back onto the floor.
“Look out!” Gene called, knocking down a third man who’d come up with a chair. What kind of man hit a lady with a chair?!
This woman’s stories were on a different level than he was used to.
He backed away from the fallen guy and bumped into someone. He raised his fist and spun, only to come face to face with the woman, who was also spinning to punch him. They laughed when they realized who they’d turned on.
The big guy was getting back up behind the woman, and the woman had raised her fist again. Gene darted around her as she socked a man who’d climbed up onto the bar with a bottle to smash over Gene’s head. He landed a one two punch on the burly guy, who went down for the count.
There was a moment of silence, then Frog crawled out from under a table. “Gene, you said I should never hit a man with glasses,” He pointed to smashed tumblers all over the floor, “But I couldn’t find nothing else to throw.”
Gene laughed and went over to him, patting him companionably.
His sweet Frog.
He turned back to the woman who’d followed him over. “Sorry about the trouble, Miss,” He said to the fiery cowgirl. He glanced around the room. Everyone was unconscious, except for Pete, who was leaning over a groaning Shorty. “I’m Orvon, and this is Lester, but for the purposes of this story, you can call us Gene and Frog.”
She looked incredibly relieved. “I was Dorothy. You can call me Dorothy,” She held out a hand and shook it. She was very strong. “I’m the Singing Cowgirl.”
“It is a pleasure to meet you,” Gene told her, “A real pleasure.”
--
“You think the story will end if I fall in love without getting married?” Gene asked.
Night had fallen and they were on their way back out of town. Once they’d proven the fires were started to cover the evidence of cattle rustling, there had been a dance, and they’d sung.
And Dorothy had sung.
She had a high, beautiful voice, better than Gene’s.
Then she’d ridden off into the sunset, on a mare named Snowy that Champion had tried to follow, for the first time in their lives together, trying to defy Gene.
But the story had taken Frog and Gene in a different direction.
Maybe there was more to the story, but for some reason, he didn’t think so.
It just felt like it did sometimes between sequences.
The stars were sharp in the black sky.
“She’d probably marry you if you asked her,” Frog raised his hand over his head, moving his fingers like he was pinching stars out of the sky.
There was no fire tonight, and they’d sold the herd in town, so it was just them and their two horses.
Gene leaned off his bedroll. “It’s not fair of me to ask, but...do you really want to go back? To 1952 and classes. Could you...be normal again after this?”
“What are you talking about, Gene?”
“I...I don’t want to go back, Frog.”
The stars in the dark western sky twinkled, over the king of the singing cowboys, and over his all time best friend.
And the story didn’t end.